Christy Carlson Romano quickly learned how different she was from her Even Stevens TV brother Shia LaBeouf.
“I remember meeting Shia for the first time and just, kind of, being very put off by him because we were very different,” Romano, 42, recalled on the Thursday, October 8, episode of the “Sorry We’re Cyrus” podcast. “[I] met Shia, a.k.a. Louis, and his hair was two different colors. Not even, like, color colors. They were, like, brown and blonde or something so crazy. He was a Venice Beach kid, he was cool [and] he was definitely destined to be that character.”
She continued, “In terms of whatever our dynamic would be, we were told the creator of the show felt like that was it, so that was meant to be.”
Romano and LaBeouf, 40, starred as siblings Ren and Louis Stevens on Disney Channel’s Even Stevens, which ran for three seasons from 2000 to 2003. While Louis served as the rambunctious youngest son, Ren was the studious middle child. Per Romano, her character was in line with her real-life upbringing.
“I had grown up being a very strict Italian-American family with my mom, who was a super stage mom and I knew my lines, I hit my marks,” she recalled to podcast host Tish Cyrus. “I was either becoming type A because of that or I just was naturally a little bit like that. Now, I wouldn’t even recognize myself ‘cause I can’t get it together most days, but [Ren] definitely had her s*** together and that’s the character I ended up playing.”
Romano, who was cast as Ren at age 14, ended up filming 65 episodes and a follow-up TV movie alongside LaBeouf and their costars.
“The reason why everybody knows it still is because Disney didn’t have enough programming, [so] they put us in reruns for 10 years,” the Kim Possible alum noted. “We got good residuals for a few years, and then they drop[ped] down … and they were a fraction, that’s when it was like cents on the dollar. But, for a while, that’s how I really banked [my income].”
In the decades after wrapping Even Stevens, Romano and LaBeouf drifted apart.
“I’ve definitely traded social comments with him online. He’s really hard to track down,” Romano previously told Us and other reporters in 2018. “I think, like, sometimes he’ll emerge from his artistic state and want to connect with people from his past. We were gonna do a reunion, and I think he was only in town for a certain amount of time, but I was filming a movie in Florida, and this was in July. We keep missing each other, but we always wish each other the best.”
